Godly Parenting

So, if there is one thing that grates on my nerves faster than anything it is repetitive noises. Naturally this means that my children are all prone to making random repetitive sound effects. I feel like I am constantly saying, "Stop making that noise!" This morning my oldest son, who is four years old, was making this odd grunting sound over and over, and I told him to stop. So he smiles and makes the noise one more time. I took this disrespect hard. I corrected him for it and as it usually goes in these sorts of situations I immediately think to myself, "I must not be doing a very good job at disciplining my kids, or he would have understood that stop means stop."

The thing that made this morning different, though, was that I began thinking about God as a parent. I do this quite a bit but today a revelation dawned on me. There is no question that God is perfect. The perfect everything, including the perfect parent. He always does the right thing, and we, His children, are still continually doing things He tells us not to do. We may not do them to intentionally disrespect Him, just as I don't think my four year intentionally meant to disrespect me, but we do them just the same. It gave me comfort to realize that even if I was, in fact, a perfect parent, that would still be no guarantee that my kids would always follow what I say to the letter, because, after all even our Holy Father, perfect in all His ways has disobedient children who need constant teaching and correction.

Thank you God, for your grace and mercy and for loving a rebellious screw-up like me.